Why Do I Have Few Memories From Childhood? Deepen Your Healing & Find Answers

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:39:23):

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things. So that kind of unpredictability, having the explosive parent oftentimes an unpredictable where we're always waiting for the next shoe to drop. Having on the other side of that disconnected parent who's never really either physically present or emotionally present, it can look like being made for different circumstances, different reasons to parent ourselves or to show up as our sibling's parent or our parent's parent a parentification. It can look like a lacking of boundaries where oftentimes for very well-intentioned, anxiety-based reasons, we have a hypervigilant, a helicopter type of parent, always micromanaging, always tending or worrying over worrying, overstepping our boundaries, telling us what to think, feel, do with our lives. It can look like that. It can look like a parent again, who has so many boundaries that they show that emotional disconnection that I was sharing earlier.

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:21):

How does having a parent who can't handle their own emotions, they're either absent or they're all up in your face or they're inappropriate or abusive, or how does that impact you as a child?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:40:35):

When we don't feel safe in our environment, again, because of external circumstances, resources that we lack, our family lacks or we don't feel emotionally safe to just share ourselves, share our thoughts, share our ideas, share our feelings, that creates an overwhelming emotional experience in us. And without that attunement or that safe, grounded human, again, more often than not, this isn't the one off where a parent was screaming and yelling one time when emotions got ran high. This is when this has become a consistent pattern. It creates overwhelming stress in our child body with a lack of support or a lack of resources that creates or that shifts us physiologically, our nervous system, into that survival mode. We are very adaptive creatures. Our body will deal with it in one way or another by fighting the situation, by becoming overreactive ourself As a child, this looks like tantruming, yelling, unable to actually soothe ourself.

 

(00:41:39):

It looks like being distracted, a flee, a flight type response where a child is always unable to pay attention, distracted doing a million different things at once. It creates a shut down experience. If the stress is too much, too consistent, and I don't have that support, you'll do what I did, and this is exactly where I ended it. The last stop on my journey was I just began to check out entirely. And I'm just describing very simply all of the different nervous systems, cycled responses that we go into when the stress or there is lack of safety in our environment, and we don't have an attuned caregiver to help literally our bodies come back into that regulation or come back into that safe experience.

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:24):

Wow, now I'm visualizing my poor daughter waking up in the morning. Like I used to wake up as a little kid wondering, which mom am I going to get today? Good mood, bad mood, loving, not loving, mad at dad with the world. And it sets you in this mode of being, as you say, hypervigilant, which is something going on in your nervous system. And I think for a lot of people that hear this the first time, Dr. Nicole, it's easy to kind of go like, well, isn't childhood like that? What human being on the planet isn't like that? I'm so used to that. Isn't that what life is like? And you talked about hope earlier. What could it be like if you were to lean into this idea, this proven, documented idea that so much of the problems that you face in your adult life have to do with these stress responses that got locked in during childhood, that you now have an opportunity to heal.

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:43:32):

What

 

Mel Robbins (00:43:32):

Could life be like?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:43:34):

I wanted to say two things quickly too that I think contribute. First and foremost, it's the reality that when we're children, we don't really have exposure to other experiences of life. It isn't until we have peers and we start to go over other people's houses maybe, and depending again how similar or different they look. We don't even, we're like, I like to use the analogy like horses with blinders on. We don't have the experience to say, okay, well this is what it looks like in my house, and it doesn't look like necessarily that everywhere else. So in that very developmentally immature way of making sense of the world, we'll assume, we'll generalize. We will make statements that, oh, this is what it is for everyone.

 

(00:44:14):

That then gets complicated by the many of us who for very different reasons, we're told explicitly or indirectly not to talk about how things were right. So we either maybe shame ourself for acknowledging the reality, and we don't even, we suppress it. We don't allow ourself to say, you know what? This is how was in my childhood. That was very much part of my journey. The story that I heard about this present mother from my siblings didn't match up with my lived experience. And because as a child, we will always defer to the adults around us, especially when we need them to care for us. I suppressed the reality that, you know what? My mom wasn't super present outside from celebrating me academically and at softball. My mom spent a lot of time dealing with her chronic pain. That wasn't the story though that I heard in my family.

 

(00:45:01):

So I suppressed my version of reality until I entered my thirties when I started to say, wait a minute, this is how it was for me. It might've been different for you in your childhoods because my siblings are 15 and 18 years older than me. They also might be locked in a past narrative, unable to come to their own conscious, honest awareness of how it was. And then again, compound it coming from a very heavily influenced Italian family where family is first and we are tightlipped. We don't tell the neighbors, we don't mention what happens inside these four walls to anyone else. Now we do get locked in a narrative that might not match up with what our lived experience is. So to answer your question, the more we become conscious, honest and allow ourselves to then feel, I've left that out of this whole process feeling about how it is that our experience was for us, allowing us to say, you know what?

 

(00:45:55):

I didn't get some needs met and I'm sad and I'm in grief and I'm angry and I'm a million different things wrapped up into one. Allowing us to have that space now to tend to how we feel about the experiences that maybe we have suppressed for so long, for whatever reason it is, will then allow us to begin to change them. Because chances are, if we're really honest and we see ourselves and day-to-day life will see a remnant of those habits, if not living directly within those habits. And again, I just want to share that because a byproduct for many of us, 

(00:46:44):

I would go out, right? Let's do things with them, and I would have no memories with time with them. I wouldn't be able to even share how my early Christmases looked. And I started to entertain this concern for a very long time that I must have something wrong in my brain, my memory area. I actually submitted myself for a study that I thought I was suffering from something called selective autobiographical memory disorder. I remember it because I thought, oh, okay, that's what's wrong with me. I have this very rare neurological issue that created this experience of, I don't remember my childhood. None of that was talked about in my family. It turns out none of us do. And the reason for that is a couple reasons. When we're not fully present, when we don't have that attuned safe space to be present to what we think, we feel how to navigate or regulate our emotions, going from overwhelmingly stressed back into safety, 

(00:48:34):

Now we have this experience of, I don't remember, and it took me beginning to share that I don't have memories walking through the shame of it all that I'm actually hearing overwhelmingly how few of us really truly, again, remember those early things. So I just wanted to go down that path quickly because 

Mel Robbins (00:49:49):

One of the things that you and I first connected over is the fact that we both have almost no memories from childhood. And I, like you used to think there was something terribly wrong with me that I was going to have early onstage Alzheimer's, that there was something off. It's menopause, it's this, it's that. It's my anxiety. And I have so many experiences like talking to my best friend from childhood, Jody Brick. And she'll be like, remember that time? And it's not little shit, Dr. Nicole. It's like, remember that time you came to visit me at Central Michigan University? I'm like, no. She's like, yeah, you came for the weekend. I'm like, I don't remember that. And so learning that it's not only just me and it's not something wrong with my brain that this is a function of the childhood shit that is in my nervous system and how I was coping and processing all this stuff that impacted my ability to make memories and that that's okay. And I actually think it's way more common than you think.

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:51:01):

Absolutely. And I'll speak to the point of how recent it is for me, even in the early years of my relationship with my partner Lolly. I mean, she has talk about the opposite. She has an elephant memory. This girl can remember what I was wearing and wild. And there's many things and moments where she's like, do you remember when we went to this place, did this thing? And up until very recently, my answer has been, no, I don't remember being there with you going meeting this person, really. And I'll have to be like, can you say more about what happened? And maybe I can recollect given other details given what she said. But sometimes when I was in a place that we might've revisited, I'll get a feeling of familiarity. She'll be like, oh yeah, you don't remember when we were here last time we did this.

 

(00:51:48):

This person was here. I might not have that recall, but my body feels somewhat familiar to what she's describing, what she's saying, the environment that we're in. And again, I just want to share that it didn't miraculously for me go away. The second I realized I didn't remember, because when I first met lolly, I was very disconnected. I was very dissociated. I was there in person having interactions in all of these different places. But my attention, my awareness myself was so, so far away that again, I still didn't retain those recall based memories and moments. So I just want to share that again because I think some of us might still have many moments. We might have something last week that we're hearing from a loved one that we did or didn't do or a place that we were at, and we might not have the ability to recall that.

 

(00:52:35):

And again, that might be maybe for someone listening, an indicator of how lacking presence of how there might've been something that feels unsafe. You might generally never feel safe. Your nervous system might still be so dysregulated that you're still on that spaceship. So your answer is, honest to God, no. You don't yet remember that thing though. I will share that as I become conscious. And for me, it's a daily commitment. It's a daily intention because I do have that habit to check out to dissociate, especially as stress goes up, it doesn't immediately just my nervous system doesn't just get on board. I have to teach myself how to stay grounded, how to stay connected, how to tolerate more and more stress so that I don't just check out and I can begin to remember and retain the life that I'm living.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:23):

So you used the word dysregulated nervous system. Can you give us all just the basic kind of what do we need to know about healing and about breaking generational cycles when it comes to our nervous system? Because we've already unpacked that most of us have an adult physical body, yet we are locked in. We're locked at a child like a child's age in terms of our ability to process emotion. And that is a hundred percent based on what you experienced as a kid in your household and your response to those experiences, whether it was to tantrum or you talked about shutting down or fawning or it was to, what was the other one? There are three, right, that you can do. You like fight or fuck to

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:54:20):

Explode or to fight, to check out, to flee or distance, distract ourself from the situation to fawn to always be hypervigilant, tending to the circumstance around us. And there's a fourth to shut down entirely like me on my spaceship, far, far away. Gotcha.

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:35):

So as a kid, you learn to do one of those things based on your parents' inability to cope with their emotion. It's how you protected yourself. But now here you are, you're 30, 40, 50, 70, 20, whatever, and you're like, this shit's not working, and I got to get a hold of this. 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:55:11):

Yeah. So just going back to all of those different ways that we were just exploring and overviewing, we tend to our emotions as an indicator of dysregulation because our body's ability, emotions live in our body, their physiological shifts changes, changes in energy, changes in hormones governed by our nervous system. So our ability to deal with, to be with, like you were talking about earlier and tend to and regulate our emotions, is completely impacted by our nervous system. And so is everything else in terms of how we're going about the world. And I think this is a little, the bigger picture of nervous system, that it extends beyond even how much stress or how much ability do I have to tolerate to regulate, to stay responsive within stress or my emotional, upsetting emotional experiences. Our nervous system dictates how we're navigating the world around us, how connected we do feel.

 

(00:56:07):

It begins with, and I was very intentional in separating the new workbook, how to meet yourself into three different sections. And assuming that most people that know my work will be attracted to the workbook, the self that I'm referencing, and the title is your authentic self. That deeper being that houses, what makes you uniquely you, Mel and me, uniquely me. It houses our purpose, our passion, our interests, our curiosities, our ability to play, to be joyful, all of that stuff that many of us, I'm sure many of you listening, feel so disconnected from. So maybe, I mean, but I very intentionally, I did not start the book with How to meet your authentic Self. It's broken up into three different sections.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:48):

Why?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (00:56:49):

And the first section is how to meet your body, how to reconnect with your body. Because if you are in that survival mode, if your body is just trying to make it into the next moment or so, it thinks oftentimes, again, based in past experiences, in past perceptions, if you are not able to navigate these emotional moments and you're bringing up stories from your past and filtering your present moment through them in terms of your whole mental or emotional habit based world, then you're not going to be able to have that safe space to reconnect, to ask those deeper questions. You're going to be locked in survival mode. So your whole way of being in terms of how connected do you feel to the world you created around me, it's no surprise that as I answered my thirties, my answer was not at all. There was a time where I would read about people.

 

(00:57:38):

I have a very vivid memory of reading one of my few, I was reading a book by Dr. Wayne Dyer, and he was a psychologist, trained, clinical trained psychologist like myself. And he was sharing more of a kind of his personal evolution from being a clinical psychologist and reconnecting with his passion and his purpose and really changing the way he worked, becoming an author beginning to speak. And I read the book at the same time that my partner at the time Loy read the book. And she was so, oh my God, so inspired and would talk about her passion and things that interest her. She's such a curious individual just in generally. And I read the book and I was like, that's a nice story. I think that maybe that purpose Gene, that passion thing, it skipped me. Here's right along the lines of that neurological memory issue.

 

(00:58:26):

I was like, I don't feel passionate, even though, again, I was marching I for long as I, for as long as you would've heard me talking about what I want to be when I grow up. I was going to be a psychologist, though it didn't come from what I was hearing. Passion, purpose, interest, curiosity, felt like. And again, all of that is because if we don't feel safe in our body, if we can't witness our emotions, be with them, remain responsive, take the value in them, and allow ourself to return back to safety. If we're, in other words, in survival mode, we're not going to have the ability to relax into explore things that we're interested in, curious about, we're not going to be able to identify or even connect with what our passion and our purpose might be, let alone make choices that are in alignment, live into that passion and that purpose.

 

(00:59:17):

So our nervous system going back kind of full circle really governs all of that. We're not going to be all feel authentically connected. What is one of the first things I say when we began this conversation, I was in relationships. I had a very active social life for as long as I can remember. I didn't feel connected though to the people around me. It was that kind of idea of being alone in a crowded room. I mean, if that didn't really describe my whole existence, because again, the reality of it was I wasn't authentically connected to myself. I wasn't authentically being me. I was always suppressing what my truth was in fear of upsetting someone else and hoping to people please or show up as they needed me and I was operating in a version of survival mode. So the workbook, again, will take you through the journey of first reconnecting with that very unique individual body of yours that does share some universal components around our nervous system, beginning to explore and identify whether your nervous system is reacting to threats, whether or not they're present or not in your environment.

 

(01:00:17):

Then we can evolve, peel back the onion if you will, and begin to explore the ego. This story, all of these creations, narratives that we began to repeat from childhood that are continuing to often color these moments of reactivity. It's not necessarily what happens that upsets us. It's the sense that we're making of it. It's the meaning that we've assigned to the actions or the non-action in our life that create those explosive moments or those moments where you're like me, come close, but don't come too close because I'm going to dagger you or whatever it is. And until again, we learn how to create enough space to be responsive, to understand that our emotions are what make us alive, and to learn how to then regulate and navigate them, we're not going to have a chance at reconnecting with our authentic self and at discovering those deeper, deeper aspects of our being.

 

(01:01:07):

So our nervous system really runs our whole ship. It's everything from the moment we're born, from the moment actually, if I want to go back further, the moment we begin our development. And for me, I believe that in a mother who was distracted, disconnected, who was dealing with very serious health related issues, and my older sister at the time who had her own health anxiety of her father dropping dead when she was in her early twenties of a heart attack of seeing a very catastrophic car accident, coming home from honeymoon with my dad when they were driving home from Florida, my mom was so nervous that actually a story that was gifted to me at her funeral just a year and a half ago, my aunt was sharing, she got up to speak and it was a very sweet story and she was sharing the story of when my mom discovered she was pregnant with me.

 

(01:01:52):

And how it began was my mom started to have symptoms, morning sickness symptoms. She was 42 years old at the time, and it was 15 years after she had her last kid. I was definitely not in a planned product. They were done. So they thought of having children. So when my mom started to have stomach illness symptoms as consistently as morning sickness would attribute to, she began to entertain the idea secretively first before she shared it with this aunt of that she had stomach cancer, which is right in alignment, right? We have a health-based anxiety, a lot of health-based fear because my sister has her own health issues. My mom has chronic health issues. Of course that's the meaning she made out of these symptoms. And she shared it with this particular aunt who urged her to go to a doctor to go see if it is indeed stomach cancer.

 

(01:02:38):

So she could begin treatment for that. And that's when she was gifted with the information that it wasn't stomach cancer at all. It was me developing inside of her. And the reason I'm sharing that is, and our first environment is that uterus, that body of the human who had us, who birthed us. So ultimately for me, what I now know, and it's not surprising that a very commonly shared story of my family is when I was born and I was born healthy and thankfully everything was okay, I was actually born with a little sore on my thumb and I sucked my thumb up until I was much older. And the joke then was is you were sucking your thumb in your mom's belly, you were sucking your thumb in utero. And I couldn't agree more. I probably was because the amount of cortisol and stress that that environment was for me with my mom unable, I mean she thought she was possibly dying of stomach cancer, how fearful she must have been of no fault of her own. In my opinion, my earliest environment felt unsafe. So I was soothing myself as a little developing fetus trying to regulate, which was for me this overwhelming stressful environment. So in my opinion, the environments that we're talking about that can contribute to our nervous system dysregulation begin when we begin our development.

 

Mel Robbins (01:04:04):

And that's where generational trauma comes in. Because I relate to what you were just talking about Dr. Nicole, because when you look back with compassion and understanding, I go, my God, my mom was 18 unexpected surprise. Here comes Mel drops out of college, gets married, all these things she didn't expect far away from her family. I can only imagine how much cortisol and fear and anxiety and upset was coursing through her veins. I think about how alone she and dad were not near family and just how hard it must've been. And I also see how that fashioned a hypervigilant, very anxious overachieving person in me. And I want to just to land this for anybody listening where this is brand new, you've never even considered these concepts. When Dr. Nicole talks about the nervous system I want you, and then she talks about slowing down and working through, for example, the first part of the book, which is going to force you to slow down and it's going to force you to get out of the autopilot of your life and truly go inward and consider your lived experience in your body.

 

(01:05:27):

The visual that I think about is your nervous system is sort of like the engine of a car. And it's like for me revving all the time. And so my lived experience for a long time, my version of autopilot was feeling like I was a car that was at, that was just the engine was revved all the time, but I wasn't going anywhere. And that I had this sense of always like trying, trying, trying, trying, trying, trying. But no relief of feeling like it was enough. What happens and what Dr. Nicole is saying is available to you that you are your best healer that you can pull over the view that you are driving past because you're on autopilot or you're checked out or you're flooring it and you're addicted to being busy and achieving and outrunning the sadness and whatever it is that you're trying to outrun, you are missing this extraordinary view because you're nervous system is just reving and healing is the process of slowing it down and pulling over and doing the inner work.

 

(01:06:41):

And again, how to meet yourself this latest, incredible, transformative work of yours. The whole first third of the book is dedicated to exercises to help you do that. And so that's the first thing that I wanted to say that what we're talking about when we talk about nervous system regulation is imagine a life where when you go to the grocery store and somebody else walks in front of you and grabs the last can of tomato sauce that you had gone to the store to buy, you don't lose your shit. You literally are able to tolerate that and not lose your shit. Or you get an email from work and your boss is curt with you and it doesn't trigger a spiral of thinking that has been around since childhood where you, that's it. I'm so unworthy, I'm so stupid. The beat down. And so when we talk about healing and we talk about regulating your nervous system, what she's actually saying is that you can liberate yourself from the experience of day-to-day life where you deliver the childhood beat down you've been doing subconsciously forever. And the small, daily, irritating, disappointing crap that happens in life doesn't send you into an emotional tsunami or send you to bury yourself in alcohol, that that is what's on the other side of this. Am I correct Dr. Nicole?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:08:15):

100%. And it begins just using a personal, my entire childhood lived experience up until my thirties and I became aware. It begins with becoming aware, becoming conscious of yourself and your current experience and in particular of your body. And what I wanted to share was I'm a self-proclaimed hippie at heart. I like to say because all I've ever wanted is peace, rest, a moment to just be and the freedom that I imagine that came with that yet what I was so largely unaware of until I began to turn that spotlight of attention down to my body is I never could rest. My family used to joke with me that I used to say, I'm bored, I'm bored. Run a mile a minute. I was doing doing always on the go, which very much mimicked always going to that next hurdle, checking that next box to simplify it.

 

(01:09:04):

I couldn't relax no matter how much my mind wanted that moment of relaxation when I didn't have anything on my schedule, for instance, and I was just sitting there, right here was my day, my Sunday, it's time to relax my body because our body is talking to our brain and communication every moment of every day. My body was so tense, my nervous system was so dysregulated. This is where no amount of, in my opinion, positive thinking, me looking around saying, well Nicole, nothing to worry about here. Just relax. You have nothing on your schedule. There's nothing to do. Why can't you just feel at peace? And the reason was because all of the signals that my body was sending my mind was that peace relax. There is something unsafe, there's a threat. Because there was tension in my muscles like you're saying, that buzz really resonated with me, Mel, my body was a buzz with how much I can't just sit in relaxation.

 

(01:09:57):

And I just wanted to share this because there are so many of us, I've come to realize who we can't relax because no matter how much we want that moment of peace and we're desperately seeking it, our body is sending our mind that that's the unsafest thing to do. We have to keep going. Our mind does then begin to race with the things to worry about, begins to scan our environment with the thing that is off begins to agitate. If there was someone near me when my body was feeling agitated and if it was a partner before long, I was probably nitpicking. I was probably creating now an interpersonal conflict because my body was so agitated that it was only a matter of time before my mind was agitated and before my environment was agitated. So the conscious awareness, again, beginning in the body, beginning in these different states of nervous system dysregulation often will give the answers to why many of you listening might not be able to feel peace, to feel restful.

 

(01:10:53):

And again, back to the hope, I assure you, rest and peace is part of what that too is wired as a possibility in our neurological human existence. Many of us just have to teach our body how to return to that space. 

Mel Robbins (01:11:30):

Incredible. I want to talk about this buzzing experience because for people that have never been to a therapist, never even occurred to them that maybe some of the things they experienced in childhood could be a form of trauma because you hear the word trauma and you think people that have had tours of duty or have been victims of violent crime or who have experienced a horrible accident or witnessed something catastrophic. And what we now know is that that's not true. That there are all kinds of small experiences that you may have dismissed or not remember that do cause your nervous system to go, oh, mom's mad. Oh, somebody's not talking to me. Oh, what? Dad's not coming home again tonight? Oh, she's drunk. Oh, what do you mean I have to be the man of the house. I needed a hug. All these little things that just flip this switch inside you as the little you that made you flip into what you refer to as vigilance. Now I refer to this as that buzzing, that sort of like, and what I noticed in my childhood is that if I was achieving everybody's happy, but if I wasn't doing something worthy of bragging about, then it was duck and covered. Who's upset? Is everybody okay? And so that's that buzzing, that sort of hyper vigilance. And when, can you talk about why it's important to notice if that's part of how you experience adult life and what it is?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:13:16):

Absolutely. I want to go back to that, expand it, expanding the need to expand the idea of what trauma is because for a very long time I didn't know why I was, I was beginning to become aware of the similarity in patterns and coping mechanisms that I was seeing in myself and the clients that I was working with who did have those big T, those big events. Again, this was another moment where I entertained this belief that maybe there's something wrong with me. I even scoured the very few memories, the recalls that I had to try and imagine could something really bad have happened because why am I coping? Why am I dealing, why am I struggling in that same way? So trauma, again, trauma really maps onto how supported are we when overwhelming, upsetting things happen? How safe are we consistently, generally, because the reality in our childhood is we are completely dependent on someone, at least one person showing up to meet our needs. We can't continue to survive on our own. And the reality of it is, and sometimes it's factors in generationally, the reality of it is children have needs that are beyond just being kept physically alive. I mean, I even know there's a brand of parenting in the not so distant past of this idea that children are like a plant, just feed them. And again, some of this is colored by trauma and

 

Mel Robbins (01:14:37):

Then resentful being resentful if you need

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:14:39):

More, right? Exactly. Or this idea of even being indebted. What I give to you, even though I've made the choice to create you to have you, and again, some of this I want to be sensitive because it is colored by lacking of resources in our childhood. I mean, I know my parents at the age that they are, my dad was born in 37 right after the Great Depression where it was a feat for parents to have even enough to put food on their table. So again, I'm extending the opportunity to be compassionate and to understand all of the different reasons why you might've had a parent who really did believe you were just a plant to be kept alive in the room. And that's not the reality. We need that emotional safety. We need that space to explore ourselves. We need a curious, safe human to create that space.

 

(01:15:27):

And when we don't have that, when they're not physically present, when they're not emotionally present, when they're emotionally unstable or erratic, one of the ways that we cope because we are incredibly adaptive is we begin that buzz. We become hypervigilant to the external world. Because if I become so attuned to a change in mood, to a change in facial expression, to whether or not my parent, if I learned the patterns of what upsets mom or dad, what creates a situation where they're not present to us, what creates a situation where they are able to give me the little bit of a attention or connection that they are unable largely in other moments. And for me, very similar to you, it was when I was keeping the peace not causing an issue, not putting any more stress on the already overwhelming stress table of the family.

 

(01:16:17):

And when I was achieving, when I was bringing something for my mom, for my dad to be proud of. And for me, that happened very early on academically and athletically. Those were the moments where I would be celebrated. At my softball games, I played softball. Well, up through college were the moments where my mom was actually present, physically present, celebrating me, talking to me about my performance in the game. So being hyper attuned to that, I very early on saw that pattern, okay, everyone's really stressed out If I don't bring any stress to the table, which means if I don't share what happened at school, if I don't bring the thing that I'm worried about, understanding that my mom that was only going to upset her. I have a moment that I remember very early on when my mom actually found a planner of mine, a high school planner, and I would write, it was my school planner, but I would write little notations of the things that I was doing, things I shouldn't have been doing on the weekends that was involving drinking and the cops a run in with the cops here and there.

 

(01:17:16):

And I had enough in there that my mom was able to somewhat make sense of and she allegedly went in. My mom wasn't someone who though some of us have parents who always are looking at our planners, always are coming into our bedroom, aren't giving us any safe space for ourselves and our own self-expression, they're violating or overstepping those boundaries. My mom typically wasn't like that. So I was a bit surprised when one afternoon I'm sitting in my bedroom and she comes slamming through my door with my planner in hand and allegedly she was looking to see when she would've had no idea that I was writing what I was writing in there when my next basketball practice was because I also played basketball in high school. Long story short, she saw enough to throw the planner at my head to collapse down onto my bed and yell, I'm having a heart attack.

 

(01:18:02):

Jesus God, take me now. And I was so scared because we already have enough health related anxiety in my family. I would literally lay asleep at night worried about my mom, my dad dying. I knew they were older given typical parents of kids my age. So that already scared me. I lived in a city, my car was stolen. I would always hear sirens. I knew bad things happened, so I was always afraid that something bad was going to happen. So now my mom in reaction to her own upset, unable to regulate and be with her own emotions about what she saw in my planner, literally collapsed into a heap scaring the shit out of me if I'm perfectly being honest and further validating this idea that unless I am perfect, if I don't bring any more stress to this table, I could actually result in my mom being harmed dying something bad happening.

 

(01:18:56):

So I just use that as one example. I am imagining there's many other things that I can't even recall where the implicit message, the feeling in the home was, don't stress anyone out, don't worry anyone more than we're already worried as a family and continue to make them feel good, make them feel proud. Get the connection that was available in those moments of connection. And for me, that meant squashing everything that I thought and that I felt and becoming so hyper attuned, so hyper aware, seeing those patterns. Another thing I think it's very common that it looks like is what social anxiety is. When we're always attuned to people around us, we are literally seeing shifts and changes in their mood. Are you upset? Is everything okay? We might begin to micromanage, unable to tolerate the possibility that something could be going on. And again, for a lot of us, that dates back maybe into our early childhood where that kept us safe. Being attuned to when dad had a bad day so you could get the heck out of the way and go hide in your room was what kept you safe. Then we continued to repeat that again, all as our best attempt at keeping us safe into adulthood because we haven't learned how to be safe, how to regulate our emotions because we didn't have that experience in our childhood.

 

Mel Robbins (01:20:15):

Well, I'm going to in just a minute, go through different types of parents and how that can have an impact on you and how that shows up in adulthood so that anybody listening might be able to start to go, oh, that was my experience. Oh, this is something I can heal. Wow. But before we do that, you have this quote that I love and I'm going to share it and then I'm going to give an example of something that happened just before you and I started this interview that I think might help people understand this quote. 

(01:21:33):

And as we were doing the tech check to get everything hooked up, I know you know where this is going. We were having trouble because there was an echo happening and I could start to, this is what hypervigilance is. Everybody I'm in therapy have been for years. I understand trauma. I'm working on healing my trauma. I'm very fluent in this. And as this is happening and all that's happening, everyone is that Dr. Nicole can hear an echo in her ear. There's just a small tech thing going on. That's it. I can feel at a cellular level, Jesse, on our team starting to get nervous. I can feel the fluttering around and I immediately, everybody flip the switch in my nervous system, the buzz kicks on. So I have this reaction, not like a feeling something's off, but now I am in my body reacting and what my experience in that moment is a trauma response because I am in a situation where I'm feeling like Dr.

 

(01:22:44):

Nicole is about to be upset with me because she is sitting there waiting for this to start and there's an echo and we don't have it figured out. And now I'm also worried about Jesse because I can feel that she's nervous. And so I in a nanosecond, everybody because of patterns in childhood flipped into that hyper vigilance uhoh mode and the opportunity that will change your life that Dr. Nicole is teaching millions of people to do is to be aware when that happens. And instead of letting it hijack you use the tools of breath and awareness and calming of self to quiet the mind and come back into the body and settle yourself, take in the view of what's actually happening. And so I just wanted to offer that because I think that it's an ongoing process, but it's very liberating when you realize that that experience that Mel Robbins just had as a 54-year-old woman is the exact same reaction that I would experience as an eight-year-old child.

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:24:04):

I want to share. So I love that you are bringing this up and are sharing of your experience. I can maybe offer for other listeners another version of what could happen. I too had one, so I didn't sleep well. I haven't been sleeping well the past couple nights. I was six several weeks ago, so actually you're, I think you're the first podcast that I've done in several weeks. Me, little overachiever, am I going to be the perfect presenter? I woke up this morning and if I'm perfectly honest, esteeming you respecting you so much, wanting to show up for your audience. There was a little voice in my head that was thinking, oh God, how am I going to be today? I have a running joke with Lolly, my partner who in the beginning of all of this, when people would ask to speak to me, even though I had all of the information, I was putting it out daily and on Instagram and all of the things.

 

(01:24:54):

The second I had the opportunity to share it with someone on a podcast, I would look at her and share panic and go, well, what will I say? And she would go, well, Nicole, you'll share what? And again, for me that illustrates this idea that unless I'm perfect, unless I'm on my game saying the words as concisely as I need to, I'm not good enough. So if I'm being honest, as this morning was approaching and I was feeling tired and I was worried that I wasn't going to be good enough, and the tech issues started happening, there was a little voice in my head that I've learned when things get difficult, when I'm unsure of myself, I want to run away. I mean, there was a time before I entered my awareness stage of my darkness of the soul. I actually entertained leaving the practice that wasn't fulfilling me. I had all of these ideas of I'm just going to run away to a foreign country. Maybe I'll just be a barista. I'm just going to leave things that are uncomfortable. So another version of me childlike mode. I had moments this morning of like, oh, good, now we're having tech issues. Maybe this can't happen today. I could just can't go and I could literally disappear so I wouldn't have to risk vulnerably showing up and being good enough just as I am today.

 

Mel Robbins (01:26:11):

Amazing. And I want you to hear that because the stuff that you haven't healed in your childhood is impacting, it's restricting, it's numbing, dampening the magic that your adult life has. And healing isn't like rainbows and unicorns. I mean,

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:26:44):

I think a lot of times you feel uncomfortable. You begin to reconnect with the reality maybe of the dysregulation in your body, all of the deep rooted emotions that we might have gotten really good at repressing, keeping it out of our conscious awareness that ignoring knowing it's there but distracting ourself or channeling it into all these socially acceptable avenues of achievement. A lot of times healing feels like we're going backward because we feel more uncomfortable. We feel more alive in not a comfortable way. There's a reason why we've created maintained these habits for so long and they've become our familiar. So as we're beginning to do new things, we're immediately automatically going to challenge that subconscious, that perceives threat in the unfamiliar, in the newness of it. And then the large majority of us are going to be met with everything that's been below the surface that we've been so seamlessly good at distracting ourself from. So a lot of times, as counterintuitive as it is, we know we're healing. When we begin to feel worse, we feel more everything. We feel life more.

 

Mel Robbins (01:27:57):

I couldn't have said it better. I want to go through some of the parenting styles or parenting realities I should say, and how that has impacted us. Okay, so what is the impact of being raised by an emotionally unavailable parent?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:28:14):

So when we don't have someone who's able to attune to us emotionally detect when we're upset, help soothe, bring us down. I mean, again, the reality of our nervous system is not only is it developing in childhood, we need another safe person to help us regulate. Like we were talking about earlier, the language we were using earlier was to bring us from overwhelmed, stressed, upset, back into that calm, peaceful safety. So when someone's emotionally apparent is emotionally unavailable, that means the more consistently that they're emotionally unavailable. Of course. And for a lot of us, that was our own survival mode, disconnected, locked away on their own spaceship. That means then we are consistently overwhelmed by our own emotions.

 

Mel Robbins (01:29:01):

I am just on behalf of my husband who had a emotionally unavailable father. And that's right. Just jam those emotions down, jam those emotions down. Let's talk about the silent treatment. When you have a parent that gives you the silent treatment, how does that

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:29:19):

Impact you? Speaking from someone who has my mom, one of the major ways she dealt with that one moment in time that I shared where she threw and collapsed was one of the, I think the reason honestly, Mel, that I remember it was it was so out of her normal way to deal with anger, which was to give the silent treatment. I mean, the most recent time was actually when she found out I was gay my sophomore year of college. She discovered it. I did not share it with them at that time, and she didn't speak to me for probably about a month and a half over a summer when I was living in the same home with her. 

(01:30:16):

A lot of times it gives us this underlying, again, because we're so attuned, it gives us this underlying feeling that indirectly the statement is there was something inappropriate, wrong, shameful about how it is you were or what it is you did in that moment. And again, the more consistently that happens, the more likely it is. Some of us are going to internalize that idea that if I'm me or if I express this aspect of me or this feeling, whatever it is that resulted in the silent treatment, we do a lot of times embed that deeper belief that part of me isn't appropriate does cause people to leave and a byproduct that then often is not only the shame in that we just are embedded within us deep rooted beliefs of how it is that we're not worthy, that we carry through us, making us less likely to show that aspect of ourself. A lot of times, and this was my experience, we then anytime we perceive anyone as being distant, as giving us that Curt responds

 

(01:31:12):

Not being available to us at needing time, natural human time on their own, a lot of us very immediately vigilantly go to that narrative of, I must've upset them, I must've done something wrong, and maybe we can't tolerate it. Maybe we begin to chase right them to try and get their attention. Because what it is is activating that deep rooted abandonment, right? You either largely weren't present or you weren't present in these moments when I was doing something shameful. And now I'm just overlaying that filter into what's happening now, even if again, why they're short, why they're unavailable, it might not have anything to do with us at all. They might be distracted with work, they might just need some time. Every human needs to be by themself. It might not be anything in reaction to anything that we've done, but a lot of times we then struggle to tolerate distance silence. And we always assume we've upset, we've wronged, we've hurt someone in those moments.

 

Mel Robbins (01:32:07):

Yeah, I have a friend whose mom would not talk to her for months and it was just targeted and it was like an emotional guillotine. And I always thought of all emotional immaturity. The silent treatment was about as close to emotional as abuse. You're basically withdrawing your love from somebody saying what you did is bad enough for me that I am not going to give you the basics when it comes to attention.

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:32:35):

You're not even a person. You're not even a person delete you. I mean, there's moments where you could even be sharing the same room with someone who's just speaking to everyone else and just not you. And that gives you that implicit message of your human is not available. I'm not available to this human. I deleted you from my experience.

 

Mel Robbins (01:32:54):

How about being an introvert? How does that impact, if you're an introverted kid, how does that impact you? Growing up,

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:33:04):

And again, very much describing my existence. So before I became very socially connected, one of the byproducts of being so afraid and fearful of the outside world was that I was painfully shy, Mel, to the extent that if I was out with my mom and a neighbor who knew me, knew my family would say hi to me, I would hide, tuck myself behind her leg. I would not, would never utter a word to them. I would try to delete them from even seeing me when my brother or sister had partners, people they were dating at the time come over to the house, people that I would consistently get to know because they were dating them for however long I would hide under the dining room table in hopes that they wouldn't see me. And again, all of that is a byproduct. While we are on a spectrum of energetic sensitivity, how much time we need alone away from other people, whether we feel more energized or connected to other people when we have these extreme versions of being introvert.

 

(01:34:00):

And a lot of times it was commented on in my family, Nicole's so secretive, Nicole's so shy, Nicole's so like withdrawn in these ways. It wasn't, that was inherently who I was. For me that was a protection, a way to keep myself safe when the outside world that I was taught was so scary, was overwhelming and scary to me. And the byproduct of that then was a initiation continuation of this habit that I've described earlier, which was that when I'm withdrawn into myself, likely I'm not sharing with the world around me what's really going on, what I'm really thinking, what I'm really feeling. I'm not open to that connection with you in any moments or when I really need you to be.

 

Mel Robbins (01:34:45):

What about when you're labeled the easy

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:34:47):

Child? I think a very common one again is when we shift into very much was describing how I was sharing my own journey earlier of trying to limit worry, trying to always show up as perfect, trying to fill the needs of others in the family or limit again the stress that we're causing. And again, all of this whole conversation leads to the messages that we're receiving. It doesn't have to be direct, right? 

Mel Robbins (01:35:42):

So what I'm basically hearing is whether it was you're the golden child, you're the easy child, you're the mature one for your age, you're introverted, there's a lot of us that get this message that you must be a certain way in order to get the attention and the love that you need foundationally. So it becomes very transactional. You can't just be yourself. I got to play a role. And if I'm not playing that role, then there's a price to pay. Mom might stop talking to me. I might not get the love and attention that I need. And so that's where this starts to kick in. If it's not like life-threatening, it certainly is emotionally threatening in terms of how we adapt. There's one final thing that I really want to talk about because you posted it recently and it really was like, and that's the post that you did about the, I think it was called the Good Guy Conditioning. And I'm married to somebody who is like that. And the piece of it that blew my mind in the series that you put up on Instagram was that boys are more emotionally expressive than girls are at the age of six. And as a society and because of generational patterns and stereotypes and just all of it, that emotional expression gets profoundly suppressed. Can you talk a little bit about this phenomenon?

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:37:28):

Humans, it's expanded our emotional beings and our emotionality, our ability, our expression of it. As children, I even think about infants when they're upset, they scream, they yell, they hit right? There's a very thin layer between their feeling and how they're expressing it outwards. So all of us as humans have emotions and seek to let them out. Just be them, react from them in childhood. And then again, there's so many different layers of conditioning that sometimes do fall along gender lines where we're given different messages in terms of what's appropriate maybe culturally at large or within our own family environment. Again, often impacted by beliefs that were ingrained in our caregivers and past generations of our caregivers that then get expressed directly or indirectly, directly where maybe little boys are told not to cry. Crying makes you weak, you'll get beat up if you cry a million versions of that where something is said explicitly to us or we might've been, again shied away from not have someone show up when we're implicitly, when we're displaying tearfulness, upset, vulnerability.

 

(01:38:46):

Maybe it's anger. Anger is such a loaded, and again, this isn't to say that some reactions from anger can be very hurtful to humans, to loved ones of humans, right? Anger though in and of itself is a natural core human emotion. It indicates we need anger. We need to know when our limits have been violated. We need to know when something is causing that desire to do something about what's happening around us. Though if we're given messaging that anger isn't okay, if we have caregivers that aren't comfortable with their own anger and don't know how to process it, if again, we're seeing culturally the results of unregulated anger that is very scary, then that byproduct might be either directly language messaging of how anger is inappropriate or it might be more subjectively, implicitly where anger isn't tolerated or again, anger feels scary for the parent themselves to see in their own child with very well-intentioned worries, concerns about what would happen if they do that on the playground or what'll happen if they don't grow out of that.

 

(01:39:52):

And again, given all of this messaging, a lot of us do then adopt that or that habit habitual reaction of suppressing, of not allowing us to be little boys in general with all of the different normal experiences of human emotions. And if we're not able to again have that safely attuned space, that safety to experiment to get curious because another reality of emotions is it's very uniquely what it's going to help each of us as individuals. Meaning I could sit here and I often, I will give sometimes examples of what might work when I'm angry, but I'm always going to follow that up with, and it might not be helpful to you when you are angry. So childhood, and this is outside of even emotions, it's a space or it hopefully can be created that safe space of experimentation, exploration where a parent isn't just telling the child what to do because that's what works when they're angry or when they're sad, but allowing the child to experiment within safe boundaries.

 

(01:40:55):

Of course, where there isn't harm caused themself or other people experiment with their own anger, their own sadness, their own upset, whatever it might be, by first being curious, allowing it to be present, being with the child so that it can remain in that safe explorative space. And then allowing the child to see what works for them. And again, because it's a tall order to do that, that assumes that the parent is able to be connected to their own emotions, be safe within their own emotions. Chances are there is some degree of that explicit or that implicit messaging that again might often does fall along gendered lines where we now have adult men who are so disconnected have this idea that it's vulnerable, it's weak, it's unsafe to emotionally be with my own feelings that we're then repressing them or suppressing them only to have them because this is what happens when like a boiling pot energy.

 

(01:41:53):

It doesn't go anywhere, explodes outward. And now we have an unsafe emotional expression, again, of no fault necessarily of the person's own, but of a responsibility to learn how to tolerate, to navigate, which begins by becoming first aware that even if they were taught it was vulnerable, it was weak, that emotions are normal. They're a human part of our experience back full circle. They make us alive, they bring us to life. They allow us to connect with other people because they allow my emotions to be uniquely mine and yours to be uniquely yours. And together we can come together and attune and be empathetic and try to understand someone's emotional world, even if it isn't how I would react. All of that begins when we maybe first become aware that we do have that good boy conditioning or whatever it is, that tendency to not allow our emotions to be what they are. The more we become conscious, of course the more we become grounded and safe in our body so that we can then become responsive to how it is that we are being about our emotions or responding to our emotions, then we could create that lived experience of being safer in our emotional expression.

 

Mel Robbins (01:43:04):

Well, I know that everybody's now like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And so obviously Dr. Nicole has incredible resources. We are going to link to all of them, one of which is how to meet yourself. It's her latest book. Although it is a self-guided workbook, it is a gift that if you're sitting there going, I got to go in. I got to heal. I want to be the person that breaks these cycles. There is something here I am telling you. Get how to meet yourself now while they're waiting for their workbook. 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:43:57):

There absolutely is. Again, full circle. Beautifully change happens when we first become conscious of where it is we're at. And the way that we create that consciousness is we begin to shift out of that autopilot of all the habits that you'll explore within the book, within how to meet yourself. If you listen to any of the content that I put out on any of the platforms, it's about becoming aware in all of these different areas, awareness happens. So when we're conscious, first and foremost. So the way we can begin is by creating one moment, one, the commitment, setting the intention. Because remember, the further we move into that unknown, the more we're going to challenge that subconscious mind, the more we're going to go right back into those familiar habits where we're comfortable. That's how we know our self, that's how we feel safest. So I will always talk about, and we talk about in my membership, the self healer circle, a concept of a small daily promise, which literally means So for this exercise of a consciousness check-in committing to every day building in one moment where you're going to check in with yourself as a conscious being.

 

(01:45:03):

Now, because most of us walk around with a cell phone, a lot of people can be helped benefit it by maybe putting an alarm on their phone for some time during their waking hours. So say you're going to set up for 2:00 PM in whatever time zone you're in. So at 2:00 PM your alarm's going to go off. If you don't want to set an alarm, you could set the intention of every day when you brush your teeth, maybe that's going to be your moment. You can anchor it to some activity that you know do daily or more often than not, maybe it's your cup of coffee in the morning. That will be your one moment, your reminder. Others, I developed when I began my journey, understanding how difficult it is to create change, how that autopilot from the moment you open your eyes, autopilot's ready to coach you through your day.

 

(01:45:44):

I actually began a practice of what I call future self journaling, which really simply is every morning, and I still do it. I wake up and I set my intention for the day. In a journaling practice, I write what that small daily promise is. So all of that is helping to remind ourselves that that autopilot is at the ready. It's going to dictate your day if you are not aware. So maybe others, I'll set one more final possibility is post-it notes, right? Writing somewhere in your day that when you go into the bathroom, you'll see the reminder for the consciousness check-in. And I'm laboring this point to really highlight how powerful that subconscious is. How if you don't set that intention and remind yourself of that intention, you're never going to be able to make that new choice. So of course it's not a magic intention.

 

(01:46:30):

You don't shut the journal, you don't see the post-it note and magically you're conscious. Now you want to embody that consciousness check-in. So what that could look like when that alarm goes off, when you see that reminder when you're brushing your teeth and you remember drinking your coffee, you want to first just tune in naturally. The second you're, oh, come to mind, oh, consciousness, check-in. Now's the moment I'm going to do it. Simply notice without judgment, where's your attention? What was it that you were paying attention to? Were you actually pouring the coffee, smelling the aroma? Were you, if it was an alarm that went off, were you really immersed in the conversation that you were having or really present to the work that you were doing or the dishes that you were washing? Or was your attention somewhere else? You were lost in thought, worrying about an argument?

 

(01:47:16):

You had an upcoming presentation. Were you not aware of the given moment? Because where our attention is is going to dictate how present we are. If I'm lost in thought, whether it's about yesterday or tomorrow or whatever it is, I'm not here to, I'm probably still doing the action of doing the dishes of drinking my coffee, but a intentionally, I'm a million miles away. So again, not to shame yourself just to notice, am I fully conscious? Am I aware of what's happening? Or did the alarm almost scare me? I jumped out of my skin when it went off. I was so lost in thought. I was disconnected, I was distracted. I was on my spaceship. And then in that moment, you can embody the choice to focus, to shift your attention. I like to say, grab a hook for your attention, and some options are your body will be breathing.

 

(01:48:04):

It's what keeps us alive. So for some of us, we can just attune in that moment to my breath, the breath of whether it's coming from my chest or from my belly, maybe just I noticing just taking the moment. Once I've come to the awareness, oh, I was lost in thought somewhere else. How is my breathing hooking our attention on our breath? For others, the breath might be difficult at first. Maybe it can be what is happening in terms of the sensational experience? My senses, is it alive because I'm washing the dishes and I smell the soap on my hands or the coffee that I've just made? Are there bright lights in the restaurant where I'm having the conversation with my friend? I might go through that. The five senses checklist where I make the intention to notice something I'm seeing, touching, tasting, hearing in that moment, I'm now in my body because I'm either paying attention to my breath, I'm paying attention to what's happening in terms of sensation.

 

(01:49:00):

Or I could just pay attention to the fact that I'm in a body grounded in time. Maybe I'm sitting and I just feel how my heels are feeling upon the earth, the walk that I'm on feeling what it's like to be in a human body with muscles that are taking those next few steps as I'm on the go and my alarm went off. Maybe I'm sitting in a nice comfortable chair, I'm laying on my couch. I can just turn my attention to how it feels to be supported. However it is that your human vessel is being supported in that moment. And that commitment begins when we set that intention, when we notice where our consciousness is not shaming ourself if you're not present. And then when we find the hook, and it might take experimenting with all of those different suggestions I just made to discover the one that just gives you a little more likelihood of becoming conscious.

 

(01:49:49):

And then you want to build on that daily commitment. Just keep that one promise for a couple weeks until you're almost like, ah, I do this now. And then build two, three moments in of your day. Because the more present we are, the more we can then expand the more full focus. Okay, well, how is my body doing? Am I in that state of dysregulation? What's racing through my mind? What are those meanings and those filters, like we touched on that are coloring emotionally, how I'm being or what I'm reacting from in this moment? None of that is possible. So we first learn how it feels to be present to ourselves in our own presence in whatever moment it is that we're living. 

(01:51:27):

And so this practice that you're going to have to prompt yourself to do and that you need to commit to doing is a way to start to awaken that feeling in your day-to-day life now so that you can develop this muscle of being present to your own experience. And it's only from there being awake that you can then start to widen that out into what you actually want your experience of life to be. And so the example that I gave and that Dr. Nicole gave where both of us had childhood patterns come up as tech was not working on either side of this, that is an example of how your past can hijack your adult experience and how through consciousness. Because notice both Dr. Nicole and I both caught ourselves because we had been practicing this muscle, and then we were able after a consciousness check-in which she just described, to use that to diffuse old patterns and make a choice about how we were going to show up now. And that is what this work is. And I strongly encourage you if you don't already, to follow Dr. Nicole online with millions and millions and millions of other people that she reaches every day at the Holistic Psychologist. How to meet yourself is a extraordinary self-guided workbook that walks you through how to meet your emotional self, how to meet your habit self, how to work through the ego, how to work through past stories. I mean, this is literally something I would expect.

 

(01:53:13):

It's gorgeous, it's color printed, it's beautiful. It is just a gift. And so give this gift to yourself. And Dr. Nicole also has a membership program that is so popular that if you're interested, you should check it out, self healer circle. But you have to be on the wait list before you can even register. So I want you to get in there and check it out if this is something that is interesting to you. So I want to thank you, Dr. Nicole, for showing up and for just really helping us understand the opportunity that we all have to heal ourselves and to, in your words, start to be the parent that we didn't have because they weren't able to do it.

 

Dr. Nicole LePera (01:54:07):

Well, I want to thank you, Mel, as always, for the opportunity to connect with you, to connect with your community, and for how you so authentically, so bravely show up in this world. I'm so, so grateful, and I'm so grateful for all of you listening. I want you to take a moment, maybe as you sign off from this podcast, to celebrate the fact that you tuned in that maybe you heard some new, maybe some even challenging ideas and you gave yourself, I love the language that you're using, the opportunity to hear something new, to challenge, maybe some familiar beliefs because it is in that newness, doing something, making a new choice, challenging maybe. What we imagined was, again, just inherently who we are, that great change, literal lifetime transformation begins. So I always like to just take a moment and honor the listeners, honor the work and the conversations, Mel, that you have that give people what I believe is a life-changing opportunity to hear new information, to make the sense of it that makes sense and resonates in their own life will then gift them with that opportunity to begin to integrate it through those new daily choices.

 

(01:55:19):

And in my opinion, it is like those dominoes that it quite literally begins with us becoming more conscious, more aware, and in my opinion, leads to maybe this sounds idealistic, but world changing, new actions of our collective. And that's what keeps me inspired to show up. So thank you again for your time, your presence, and who you

 

Mel Robbins (01:55:38):

Are. Oh, you're the best. Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed that video by God, please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a thing. Thank you so much for being here. We've got so much amazing stuff coming. Thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family. I love you. We create these videos for you, so make sure you subscribe.